Roddy Forsyth: the first ever football international was indeed the start of something big

If you are a football fan – no matter where you might be on the planet – raise
a glass in salute of St Andrew’s Day. If you happen to be a football fan
lucky enough to live in or around Glasgow, you can mark the occasion by
making a simple pilgrimage to the West of Scotland Cricket Club ground in
Partick and looking through the railings.

Famous win: Denis Law (second from right), raises both arms after scoring in Scotland's 3-2 victory over World Cup winners England and Scotland at Wembley in 1967Photo: GETTY IMAGES

For it was on that grass sward on St Andrew’s Day, 1872 – exactly 140 years ago on Friday afternoon – that the world’s first international football match under Association rules was played between Scotland (entirely composed of Queen’s Park players) and England. Sticklers for the exact time should note that, although kick-off was advertised for 2pm, the large crowd caused a 20-minute delay.

First match: the ticket to get into the first Scotland v England international at Hamilton Crescent, Partick in 1872 was one shilling

Meanwhile, on the other side of the River Clyde, the impact of this epochal occasion will be commemorated when Fifa vice-president Jim Boyce opens an exhibition composed of mementos from all the world confederations at the Scottish Football Museum in Hampden Park.

The exhibition is called The Start of Something Big and – unusually for football – the title is a gross understatement. Of course, football – of sorts – was in existence long before 2,500 spectators (or 4,000, depending on which accounts are to be believed) thronged to Partick on that immortal Saturday afternoon.

In the second century BC a game called tsu chu – literally, kick-ball – was played in China and featured bamboo goalposts and nets. The ancient Greeks and Romans participated in a version which allowed handling and bore some resemblance to American football.

In the 16th century in England, football was described by Philip Stubbes in the Anatomie of Abuses as more of “a friendly kind of fight than a play or recreation, a bloody and murdering practise than a felowly sport or pastime”.

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And by the start of the Victorian era, there was still plenty of scope for mayhem by the more psychopathic practitioners, to judge by the account by an anonymous author of a poem called The Football Match, which tells of a match on Salisbury Plain:

The ball it being thrown up, my boys, the game it did draw nigh,

Young William stuck a sharp penknife into young Jackson’s thigh!

Here’s health unto these rippling lads, and so the game went on.

But there came a point at which it was felt that the use of weapons (at least by players) went against the spirit of the sport and – once those with a preference for handling an oval ball split off to play rugby – the Football Association first codified football as we know it today. However, the rugger chaps were off the mark sharply in other respects and when the first rugby international was played at Raeburn Place, Edinburgh – on March 27, 1871 – Scotland beat England by a goal and a try to a goal.

Stung by this development, Charles Alcock, the honorary secretary of the FA, wrote to the Glasgow Herald to slam down the gauntlet. “In Scotland, once essentially the land of football, there should still be a spark left of the old fire.”

Alcock’s words did indeed ignite tinder, hence that historic meeting of the Auld Enemies at the West of Scotland Cricket Club – where, by the way, the scene has scarcely altered over the intervening 140 years.

The landscape of international football, though, has developed into a terrain far more lush and exotic than anything the pioneers of 1872 could have imagined – although one suspects that they knew they were on to something with more than a smidgen of potential.

Just consider the fact that, for the 2014 World Cup finals in Brazil, a total of 203 national teams entered the qualification stage and compare that to the membership of the United Nations – currently 193 states.

Scotland began to expand the frontiers of the known world of football to encompass a first game against Wales in 1876 (the Welsh did not play England until 1879) and by 1882 the Home Nations unit was established, including Ireland.

It took another 22 years for football to begin its organised conquest of the rest of the globe, when Fifa was formed in Paris in 1904 with France, Belgium, Denmark, Holland, Spain, Sweden and Switzerland as the founder members. More to the point, the Association game was only one of several codified pastimes to emerge from Victorian Britain – so how did it emerge unchallenged as the world’s most popular sport?

As William McGregor – the Scot who founded the Football League – observed: “Football will never die because it is not easy to conceive the introduction of a game which will prove its superior.”

Yet the Association game began as the patrician sport of public schoolboys, who favoured the dribbling style. The dawn of the global phenomenon was witnessed on St Andrew’s Day, 1872, when the spectators were reported to have been excited by the Scots’ superior team work and the fact that they had found a new and splendid way to play.

As a football writer declared 16 years later, “the introduction of a combination of passing tactics from forward to forward to the discouragement of brilliant dribbling by individual players, so far revolutionised the game that we may fairly say that there have been two ages of the Association play, the dribbling and the passing”.

Yes, the style that finds its divine expression in Barcelona’s mesmerising tiki taka embedded itself in international football on that chilly day in Partick. Mind you, devotees of the attacking game should note that each side fielded seven forwards in a goalless draw – a result not duplicated in the annual meeting until 1970.

Sadly, England v Scotland has slipped from the calendar, although it will be revived next August at Wembley in celebration of the 150th anniversary of the FA.

For the moment, though, commemoration of the first international reminds us that the English laid down the rules of football so that the rest of the world could play the game – and the Scots transformed it into an art, so that the world could enjoy it.